Monday, January 07, 2008

We're Back!

It's hard to get back into the routine after three weeks away, but things went pretty smoothly today. We had a fund-raiser assembly first thing, and nobody seemed to enjoy sitting on wet benches on a cold morning. We scurried back into our warm room as soon as possible, and we started the New Year with cleaning out our desks and changing seats. We shared a little about what we had done fun or interesting over our vacations.

Our new theme in Open Cort is called "Mystery to Medicine." It is supposedly about the development of modern medicine from folk medicine roots, but the selections are so slanted towards the wonders of folk medicine that without a little guidance I think the students end up thinking that the shaman is superior to the surgeon. As teachers, we do the best we can sometimes with the tools we are given.... Anyhow, to introduce the theme we discussed 19th century patent medicine and how these "miracle elixirs" were advertised and sold. I shared some examples of these I found on the Internet, and then the students came up with some advertisements for their own patent medicines. I'll show some examples of these on the blog tomorrow. Many were quite creative!

The rest of the day was pleasantly uneventful. We read and discussed a chapter in the Social Studies book; we did another section of the Open Court test; we corrected a math test left over from last week; and we discussed how easy it is to multiply big numbers like 200 times 3000.

Home Studies: (1) Chapter Review, Social Studies, page 163, numbers 1-15 only. Write definitions only on numbers 1-6. Be sure to answer other questions in complete sentences. (2) Open Court packet, pages 1-5 only. (3) Math, pages 186-187, all problems.

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